Solace, Revisited Poem by Fred Rik Kesner

"Solace, revisited"


The house is quiet,
not with absence
but with a soft weight
of things that have learned
to stay.

A cup waits on the bench,
sat on a small speck of light.
The oven radiates its warmth
into that late hour.

I used to call this solitude,
as if the word itself
were a door closing.

Now it feels like
a room settling around me,
walls leaning into their own stillness,
offering a place
to set down the day.

Solace was once a horizon
I could never reach.
Tonight it is the kettle
warming without hurry,
and the quiet way
the house remembers
how to hold me.








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